I recorded Heavy Metal overnight and just watched it. It's the first time I've ever seen that film, though I've read one or two scathing deconstructions of it online, so I had an idea what to expect. Mostly it deserved the scathing; the majority of it is uneven and self-indulgent, and the frame story/unifying thread of the Loc-Nar is completely incoherent.

"I am the ultimate evil in the universe and you are destined to kill me, so rather than kill you in five seconds like I do everyone else, I'll show you stories of my evil victories, plus a few times I was defeated, plus a couple of stories that hardly have anything to do with me, and then in the last story I'll be destroyed and that will somehow blow me up in the here and now too, so I guess you actually have nothing to do with my destruction. Oops!"

However, the Moebius-inspired Taarna segment was very impressive, much better than the rest (at least until the ending). Good animation and designs, and great music by Elmer Bernstein.

I never cared for Heavy Metal the magazine, and the movie didn't impress me a whole lot either.

I've got to pay more attention to the movie names on the TCM schedule, rather than just the genre icons. Tarzan the Fearless from 1933 with Buster Crabbe was on yesterday, and I only caught the last fifteen minutes or so.

Not TCM, but if you have This channel (yes, This is the name), you get to see the 1972 Tales From The Crypt movie. I may have seen it as a kid, but I don't really remember. This is channel 297 on my Comcast, but it may be different where you are.

That is some good stuff. Illustrated Man is one of the movies I missed a couple of weeks ago. I'm looking forward to Perils of Paulin and the Dr Goldfoot sequel. There's a couple on there I'm not sure I've heard of.

This TV has a scary Friday the 13th schedule today starting at 10am: Frogs, Tower of London, Twice Told Tales, Tales From The Crypt, Addams Family and Addams Family Values.

I went ahead and recorded The Illustrated Man anyway, and I kinda wish I hadn't. What a sluggishly directed movie. Everything took much longer than it needed to. And though my memory of the original Bradbury stories is vague ("The Veldt" is the only one I have a strong memory of), I don't think it did them justice. "The Last Night of the World" in particular was badly handled.

Plus I could've done without seeing so much of Rod Steiger's exposed skin. Why couldn't Bradbury have written The Illustrated Sexy Woman instead? (Lydia, oh Lydia...)

Then again, this movie's version of "The Veldt" may deserve credit as the forerunner of the holodeck concept. As I recall, in the original story, the simulations in the "nursery" were just photorealistic animated wallpaper, like a wraparound TV screen. In the movie, they were fully 3-dimensional "electronic projections" that created an immersive environment -- and the bare walls of the deactivated nursery had a vaguely holodeck-like grid structure.